Enterprise private cloud

Morphlabs, a provider of enterprise cloud architecture platforms, has simplified the process of building and managing an internal cloud for enterprise environments -- enabling companies to create their own private cloud infrastructure. The Manhattan Beach, Calif. company today announced a significant upgrade to its flagship product, mCloud Controller. The enhanced version introduces Enterprise Cloud Architecture (ECA), a new approach that provides enterprises with immediate access to the building blocks and binding components of a fault tolerant, elastic, and highly automated platform. Morphlabs also announced a partnership with Zend Technologies Ltd., whose Zend Server will be shipped as part of the mCloud Enterprise, said Winston Damarillo, CEO at Morphlabs. mCloud Controller is a comprehensive cloud computing platform, delivered as an appliance or virtual appliance, as well as providing open mCloud APIs (you can manage the ECA cloud from an iPad, for example). To … [Read more...] about Morphlabs eases way for companies to build private cloud infrastructures, partners with Zend

Platform Computing on Tuesday released Platform ISF 2.1, which improves ease of use and automation for building and managing enterprise private clouds. Platform's cloud management software helps enterprises transition from internal IT to more productive and efficient private cloud infrastructure services that support multi-tier applications. New in Platform ISF 2.1 is a dynamic “single cloud pane” for cloud administration; expanded definitions for support of multi-tier application environments such as Hadoop, Jboss, Tomcat and WebSphere; and enhanced business policy-driven automation that spans across multiple data centers. [Disclosure: Platform Computing is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.] Enterprises looking to take advantage of the cloud do so for many reasons but one of the key ones is to enhance their agility in response to changing business dynamics. By automating delivery of complex enterprise infrastructure and production applications across … [Read more...] about Platform ISF 2.1 improves use, breadth of private cloud management, sets stage for use of public cloud efficiencies

This week at VMworld, as part of the main keynote address Monday, one company and its design and implementation of a private cloud rose above the rest. Revlon and its CIO were in the spotlight for such impressive returns on their cloud. In just two years, Revlon has benefited by nearly $70 million from savings due to cost avoidance and reductions. Here to tell us about how private cloud such savings emerged and to describe one of the most efficient enterprise private cloud implementations in the world is David Giambruno, Senior Vice President and CIO at Revlon. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.] Gardner: Is there a reason for doing private cloud holistically, completely, rather than piecemeal? What’s the benefit for doing it that way? Giambruno: From a technology standpoint, we look at ourselves as doing oneness. We pick one way and we … [Read more...] about Cosmetics giant Revlon harnesses power of private cloud (VMworld Case Study)

One startup led by some of the founders of OpenStack has come out of stealth mode. Piston Cloud Computing, which has developed a cloud operating system for enterprise private clouds, debuted today in advance of a key OpenStack conference next week. The developer's preview of that cloud OS, dubbed pentOS, is available on October 3. General availability is expected Nov. 29. The OpenStack project, the open source standards-based cloud platform, was originally developed by NASA and Rackspace and announced in July 2010. It was aimed to prevent cloud lock-in. Joshua McKenty, the former chief architect of NASA Nebula, and Christopher MacGown, formerly of the Rackspace Cloud team, announced the formation of the 15+ person OS company in San Francisco on Sept. 27. Piston has received a $4.5 million Series A investment round led by Hummer Winblad and True Ventures. McKenty said Piston Cloud Computing's approach differs from that of his former colleagues at Nebula in … [Read more...] about Piston launches OpenStack cloud OS for private clouds

Private cloud should, in many ways, be competitive with public cloud services -- and not just an extension of a virtualized data center. Ultimately, when it comes down to picking the right IT resources for business problems, end users will make their choices between available on-premises services and comparable solutions from outside providers. These are some of the points drove home by Forrester analyst Lauren Nelson, speaking at this week's Interop conference in New York. Nelson makes the observation that by listening to pundits and reading IT media, one may conclude that "everybody's on the cloud." But that's just not the case yet, she explains. While many companies may think they have private cloud in place, they are usually missing some essential component. A true full-functioning private cloud, she says, needs to meet five criteria: It needs to be standardized, automated, self-service, shared, and based on a pay-per-use model. The bottom line, she says, … [Read more...] about Another call for market-based pricing of private cloud services

You've told your ITOps team to make it happen, you've approved the purchase of cloud-in-a-box solutions, but your developers aren't using it. Why? Forrester analyst Lauren Nelson and I get this question often in our inquiries with enterprise customers. We've found the answer and published a new report specifically on this topic. It's core finding: Your approach is wrong. Your asking the wrong people to build the solution. You aren't giving them clear enough direction on what they should build. You aren't helping them understand how this new service should operate, or how it will affect their career and value to the organization. And more often than not, you are building the private cloud without engaging the buyers who will consume this cloud. And your approach is perfectly logical. For many of us in IT, we see a private cloud as an extension of our investments in virtualization. It's simply virtualization with some standardization, automation, a portal, and an image library, isn't it? … [Read more...] about Why your enterprise private cloud is failing

Amazon Web Services has included virtual private clouds into its EC2 instances in a move that may render the marketing pitches of a lot of hardware companies moot. At the very least, AWS threw a virtual curveball to its physical data center rivals. In a blog post, AWS outlined that ever EC2 customer will have advanced networking and features included in its Virtual Private Cloud service. Earlier: Amazon dominates cloud infrastructure market - but new challengers emerging | Amazon to set up new EC2 customers on private cloud AWS noted: To enable this, starting soon, instances for new AWS customers (and existing customers launching in new Regions) will be launched into the "EC2-VPC" platform. We are currently in the process of enabling this feature, one Region at a time, starting with the Asia Pacific (Sydney) and South America (São Paulo) Regions. We expect these roll-outs to occur over the next several weeks. AWS has plenty of other details about how it's … [Read more...] about Did Amazon just nuke enterprise private clouds?

Proponents of the private cloud typically focus on the operational benefits it offers an enterprise -- such as flexibility, agility and the ability to scale quickly. The financial stakes, meanwhile, are often less clear. Nokia is aiming to change that with its new, IDC-validated financial analysis that lays out the cost savings achieved by moving from legacy IT to a private cloud. After making the move, most large enterprises can save at least 25 percent on their IT costs over five years, the analysis shows. It also concludes that an enterprise can expect to break even on their investment in less than three years. The analysis -- called the Nokia Enterprise Private Cloud TCO Model -- was validated by IDC and is the first of its kind in the industry. "The perception is private cloud is too expensive," Michael Williams, head of Nokia's Enterprise Cloud and Financial Segment Marketing, told ZDNet. "We're trying to counter that for the entire industry, not just Nokia, to say, 'No, private … [Read more...] about Nokia analysis: Moving from legacy IT to private cloud makes financial sense

We've already accepted that hybrid cloud is the future of infrastructure for most enterprises - research repeatedly confirms that cloud is and will be a major component of enterprise infrastructures. In other words, enterprises expect their hybrid cloud architecture to consist not of a self-contained pilot project in the public cloud but a full-blown, integrated application farm stretching across multiple datacentres in multiple geographies, probably across multiple service providers. Private cloud to the fore? Yet there remain those who argue that a private cloud has a leading role to play in the armoury of enterprise's infrastructure. The issues over moving to public cloud are likely to be the same as they were at the start of the cloud revolution: enhanced control over costs, data and the infrastructure. There are arguments a-plenty as to why public cloud can override many if not most of those objections, but one trumps them all. The fact remains that building and maintaining a … [Read more...] about What future for private cloud?

There has been significant enterprise focus on tiered storage algorithms that route data to the most appropriate storage media based upon how frequently the data needs to be accessed, with particular attention paid to tier one, the most rapid access storage for data that requires quick and frequent retrieval.But back in the "data dungeon" where up to 85% of all enterprise data resides in storage that is seldom accessed, there is an equally looming crisis of how this data can be optimally managed and maintained at the lowest cost, with appropriate data storage, retrieval, security, and access policies in place.The name for this infrequently accessed but nonetheless necessary data is "cold storage." Determining whether data is "hot" (frequently accessed), "warm" (moderately accessed), or "cold" (infrequently accessed) is often the job of a storage administrator who assesses how long it has been since various categories of data have been accessed. In some cases, data centers are even … [Read more...] about Cold storage meets big data: Run low-cost analytics in the private cloud